


Precipice

by Monochromely



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, lots of pining, lots of sentences starting with coordinating conjunctions bc I'm lawless
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 03:16:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13941426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Monochromely/pseuds/Monochromely
Summary: Steve and Natasha’s relationship has always been defined by precipices; they’ve teetered on the edges of labels and gone over them, and somehow, they’ve become closer than they ever had any right to be.





	Precipice

**Author's Note:**

> With all the new promo pics, I’ve literally thought of nothing but Romanogers lately, and then I felt the dumb urge to write about it, so here’s this loosely cobbled, thematic mess, lol.

Ever since their acquaintance had begun, they’d always been on the precipice of something. _Distrust_. As they combed the wide world for Loki and his scepter, he watched, sometimes with fascination, sometimes with unease, as she slunk around the helicarrier with a wry smile that very rarely reached her eyes. There was a calculation in her appearance—from her studiously laid back shoulders to the inflection of her low voice, which was always modulated to be... pleasing. She was polite, composed, but he intuited more than knew that these were only expertly drawn curtains as opposed to genuine reflections of her character. Steve didn’t know what to make of Natasha Romanoff. She discomfited him.

They’d always been on the precipice of something, you see. _Friendship._ Fury realized they were the ideal team and paired them up permanently on missions to maximize “workplace productivity”, he’d said with something like a grim smile. It lifted one corner of his scarred mouth and contrarily had the effect of making him appear even more intimidating.

“What about Barton?” Steve quickly snapped his head to look at her; there was a crease between her brow, a frown just ghosting her lips. (This was the first time he’d ever heard her not immediately accept a law handed down by Fury—not that she was obedient to him, per say. There had just always seemed to be a deep level of understanding between them, the unspoken kind, where they were on the same wavelength. A super assassin radio station.)

“Agent Barton has requested less time on from the field, wants to get his head on straight after having it wrenched apart by that Asgardian greaseball.” The director leveled a raised eyebrow at Natasha; it wasn’t exactly hostile, more inquiring, probing, assessing. His gloved fingers were templed thoughtfully below his chin. “Is this arrangement suitable for you, Agent Romanoff?”

The gravel in his voice seemed to churn softly for Natasha.

Steve had to give her credit; if the arrangement _was_ indeed unsuitable, she concealed it easily. Her features smoothed into mask perfection once more. 

“Yeah, no problem.” She grinned at Steve, suddenly (maybe too suddenly) mischievous—he offered a tentative smile in return—and so their partnership began.

She wouldn’t let him know her, not really, not as he would have liked. Instead, he discerned, she presented him with a skillfully chosen personality and forced him to accept it as best as he could.

 _I’m witty,_ she said with each quip aimed at his love life... or lack thereof more accurately.

 _I’m friendly… to a very deliberate precision_. They talked easily during missions, joked back and forth with each other like soldiers were wont to do, and sometimes, between her and the S.T.R.I.K.E. team, he tasted the old comradeship he had had with the Howling Commandos. He would betray his cluelessness about some 21st century pop culture reference, and on cue, she’d teasingly call him an old man, a fossil, a museum artifact. He laughed at her unfailingly wry commentary on the world. She recommended that he watch _Die Hard._ He knew she preferred handguns to rifles, and she had his back in the heat of battle. In the span of a couple of months, they learned each other’s weak spots, and what’s more, learned to _cover_ them for each other. He went high; she went low. It was nice, but _nice_ was the only kind of relationship Natasha would allow. Steve wanted to know what swirled behind those green eyes of hers, wanted to sketch her out in full color—all her sultry reds and her brilliant oranges and the black edges she so masterfully kept hidden. The entire world knew everything and then some about Steve, and _he_ wanted to know _one_ person. 

At the very least, he wanted to know his partner further than her name and affinity for clever puns.

 _I’m not who you think I am,_ she suggested gently but firmly every time he tried.

Their relationship was _nice_ , and then someone killed Nick Fury.

And all the careful barriers between them shattered.

“Who do you want me to be?” She asked him, a little mockingly, a little seriously, as though she would readily adapt any persona he named, as though she knew she had the skill to appropriate whatever role he required of her. Steve didn’t doubt her confidence—he’d gotten the impression that most people were taken in by Natasha’s persuasive attempts—but as he took his eyes off the road to glance her way, at her boots unceremoniously slapped on the dash, at the casual way she was leaning in her seat, he had the vaguest idea that her insolence was just another scrupulous guise.

Nick Fury died, and she’d blown a bubblegum bubble in his face.

“A friend,” he said simply, and her brow furrowed.

As though she didn’t trust the word.

As though someone (maybe many someones) had given her a reason not to.

(The friendship part would come soon enough. There were some things you couldn’t share without liking each other, and HYDRA raining missiles down on you in a New Jersey bunker was one of them.)

One time, they were _literally_ on a precipice. It was in Sokovia, and they were surely going to die. The sun and the land were both decaying rapidly, crumbling into nothingness—rubble and smoke and bodies everywhere—and all of it was on fire because that’s just how those things go. Ultron’s army was endless, Ultron himself seemingly unstoppable. They were both breathing heavily, scratched up and scuffed up, approaching the limits of their bodies but unwilling to admit it. This reprieve was all they were going to get.

“There’s worse ways to go,” Natasha shrugged, flippant but he’d long understood what that was code for. They stood side by side on failing ground as the Sokovian skyline turned into ashes. She smiled, even as blood dripped down a thin line from her lower lip. “Where else am I gonna get a view like this?”

Steve opened his mouth and closed it and could not bring himself to look at the sky. Her hair was like a sunset, and when she met his eyes, the whole gravity of his world seemed to tremble.

A view indeed.

Before they parted ways, he kissed her on the forehead— _casually_ , he said to himself—and told her to make it out alive.

She chuckled sadly. “Always the optimist, Rogers.”

But he had the impression that she didn’t think that was a bad thing.

Against all odds, they survived Sokovia, and somehow, everything snowballed into the Avengers fighting each other in the parking lot of an airport.

(See? Steve could do the flippant thing, too.)

The last time he saw Natasha, she was stunning the new king of Wakanda with her widow bites, and the last word she spoke to him was, “Go.”

_Go, and let me face the consequences of what you’ve done._

She wasn’t the only one either.

Sam.

Wanda.

The guy who could shrink himself.

Clint said that if they were going to win this one, some of them would have to lose it.

Steve and Bucky made it to the jet, narrowly escaping Black Panther’s vibranium claws, and through the dusty window of the cockpit, he could just make out Natasha’s striking hair waving in the hurricane roared into existence by the propellers.

And here was the precipice of absence.

In the heat of battle, in the midst of keeping Buck alive and finding Zemo and fighting Tony, he naturally hadn’t had time to feel the full impact of what this new era meant—what it felt like, tasted like, how it worked.

But it caught up to him stealthily, tapped him on the shoulder when he was least expecting it.

He situated Bucky at Wakanda and rescued Sam, Clint, Wanda, and Scott Lang from the super-max fortress suspended in the sea. (“The food was terrible,” Sam lamented, punching Steve in the shoulder. “Can’t believe I endured that for your sorry ass.”) 

Natasha wasn’t there.

And for some stupid reason, he thought she _would_ be.

On the occasional monitor in the prison, rewards for her capture flashed before his eyes. They’d used a press picture from the Sokovian Accords, a candid he judged by the way she wasn’t looking directly at the camera but rather at a point somewhere above it. Her dark hair fell like ribbons across her shoulders.

He took out a security guard and paused long enough to savor the sharp pang created by the image.

And he carried it with him as he continued down the dimly lit hall, nurturing it in the enraged thrust of his fist into an enemy’s face.

In another’s stomach.

In a superbly executed roundhouse kick.

He was pleasantly surprised to discover that she’d left him a burner phone.

It was in the storage unit he had rented in Washington a couple of years back. Once the initial shock faded, he was less surprised that she had thought to go there in the first place. Just before they broke into a top-security fort to steal Sam’s gear—an excellent escapade in its own right—they’d raided it for supplies. (Natasha lovingly fingered a Glock 26, and he amiably told her take it.)

It was a convenient place to keep weapons and extra clothes and money, and the little black, nondescript thing was neatly situated on a box with a succinct note written in her small, slanted print.

_For emergencies. Be safe._

Four innocuous words, and he slipped them, along with the phone, into his pocket. It comforted him to know that wherever she was in the world, she had an identical one, a single tether between them in this new silence.

 _Be safe,_ he thought in her direction. _Please._

He grew out his hair and beard and laid low in hideouts all across the States.

Sam stayed with him.

From time to time, their own faces would flash up at them from wet flyers roughly stapled to telephone poles or on local news stations that stressed the importance of dialing up the tip line should one spot these dangerous war criminals.

They donned disguises and clung to the shadows of anonymity.

Mostly, this meant sticking to seedy motels in the seediest parts of already seedy cities because Steve’s bulging muscles weren’t exactly inconspicuous.

If Sam was getting tired of eating at drive-thru McDonald’s, he didn’t once complain.

(Okay, he _did_ complain, but in that resigned, teasing sort of way of his.)

Once, they visited Clint on his farm. It was only a brief respite despite protestations from both Bartons—Steve was ultimately paranoid about endangering his friend further—but one day, while he accompanied Clint to feed the chickens, he casually-not-so-casually asked about Natasha. Had he heard from her? Was she safe?

The archer with the incomparable eye regarded him thoughtfully, knowledgeably, and not for the first time since their friendship had begun, Steve felt as though he was being surveilled from the inside out, pierced through like an x-ray.

“Nah,” he finally said, throwing a handful of feed into the coop, “haven’t heard from her, but it’s not unusual for Nat to be radio silent when she wants to go off the grid like this. She’ll find a way to get in touch when she wants to.”

“I know,” Steve replied grudgingly, watching as the chickens—quite viciously, he thought—flocked to their food. “I just hate that I didn’t get to make things right with her, y’know? It’s my fault she’s on the run right now.”

“Aw, cut the crap, Cap,” Clint laughed. “Nat’s a big girl, and being on the run is no new experience to her. She knew the consequences of stunning the freakin’ king of Wakanda, and she was willing to pay them because she believed in you. We all did… well, do.”

He simply nodded, unable to find the right words for his gratitude, and Clint reached up to clap him hard on the shoulder.

“You’ll see, Spangles. It’ll all turn out right in the end.”

Regardless, he felt the weight of the little, black phone in his pocket everywhere he went.

Weeks passed and turned into months. The precipice of absence yawned on—long enough for Sam to start making quips about how he was starting to look like a hunky caveman—and then Thanos came to Earth wielding a gauntlet powered by infinity stones.

Naturally, he promised world domination.

The subjugation of humankind.

The total annihilation of anyone who stood in his way.

The usual fare.

While Sam was in the bathroom coordinating a rendezvous point for a Wakandan jet to pick them up, Steve stayed in the bedroom and turned on the burner phone for the first time since he’d discovered it some nine months ago. There was one number programmed in it, and the contact name was, quite appropriately, a winky face. For the first time in days, he felt a small smile crook at the corners of his pinched mouth.

He pressed the green button.

The tone buzzed once, twice, three times, and then…

“Hey there, old man.”

“Natasha,” he breathed, relief comparable to ecstasy flooding through his entire body at just _hearing_ her voice, this implicit proof that they still occupied the same world together. “How’s it been?”

“Fine, I suppose.” Her amusement was evident. He thought he detected something else in there, too, but it may have just been wishful thinking. “Took out a couple of obscure terrorist cells. Got trashed at a few Scandinavian bars. Accidentally bleached my eyebrows into nonexistence when I was trying to go for a honeysuckle blonde color. I should have just gone brunette, but I digress… I assume you’re calling about that big, purple brute that just landed in Manhattan?”

“Spot on as ever, Romanoff,” he laughed, trying to imagine the botched state of her eyebrows. (He could only go as far as imagining that blonde probably suited her _almost_ as nicely as red did.) “Care to join Sam and I in Wakanda? Sounds like Thanos is after infinity stones, and King T’Challa has just let us know that there’s one in Wakanda that needs to be strategized over.”

Black Panther’s army power was considerable, but he had admitted to uneasiness about being the only super-powered warrior in the country. Some backup strength would be appreciated.

“Count me in,” she agreed immediately. “It’s been too long since I’ve had a near death experience at the hands of a power hungry alien.”

Her sense of humor was the same as ever.

 _She_ was the same.

And it was pretty miraculous, he thought.

They’ve all been through so much.

“I’ve missed you, Nat,” Steve said suddenly, quietly. The words cracked against his throat painfully, and they bothered his sternum, and the raw truth of it was enough to rent him in two. All at once, the greatness of the breach between them crested within him and crashed, every single second of it torrenting through his veins.

Nine months.

Thirty nine weeks.

Two-hundred and seventy three days and counting.

And _everything_ was different, but she was still the same.

A constant in this mad, mad world.

His constant.

Natasha didn’t miss a beat.

“I’ve missed you, too, Steve.” She was soft, deliberate, vulnerable—like a tentative flower cautiously unfolding at the beginning of spring. She let the moment linger for a few seconds longer than she was used to giving, and he appreciated the implicit trust in the sentiment. “Grab a pen, and I’ll give you my coordinates…”

Tony’s shaky hologram message echoed around the throne room ominously: _Vision’s dead. He’s coming for Wakanda._

What little had been visible of Stark’s face was smeared with blood.

_Vision’s dead._

Sam swore violently.

The ground revolted beneath Steve’s feet.

He looked over to see that Natasha was steady but pale, her fingers clenched into fists.

_He’s coming for Wakanda._

T’Challa began to declare war orders to all of the tribal chiefs and warriors.

The courtroom disseminated in the brilliant crimson of the Dora Milaje, the royal blues of the Border Tribe, the emerald green of Nakia’s robes. M’Baku’s gorilla pelt flung out of the double doors with a kind of desperate ferocity.

Queen Ramonda pulled her only daughter close to her chest.

“Steve, Natasha, Sam,” T’Challa finally rumbled in their direction. He paced along the ornate floor with pronounced agony, his hands clasped behind his back. The silver ring he wore gleamed in the golden light beaming down from the ceiling fixtures. “We—and Sergeant Barnes if he consents—shall make up the front line against Thanos’s army. The Dora Milaje will be with us as well.”

Steve nodded. It was a sound plan. 

“The tribes will make up the perimeter?” Natasha asked.

“Yes,” T’Challa confirmed, “all except for the Jabari tribe. M’Baku has graciously agreed to be the defense closest to the infinity stone, which is hidden deep within our ancestral caverns. We’ll be evacuating civilians into the mountains as well.”

“Regardless, this is going to be one hell of a battle.” Sam shook his head in disbelief, his hands frustrating his neck in a shaky gesture. “I mean, Vision’s gone. _Vision._ Homeboy was virtually indestructible.”

The king inclined his head mournfully. “Indeed, but we _must_ stop Thanos _here_. In the stories of my people, this particular infinity stone almost leveled the entire continent once, abused as it was in the hands of the wrong person.”

“We _will_ stop him here,” Steve said, his vocal confidence not entirely felt. The power of the tesseract alone had pretty much destroyed Manhattan.

With Vision’s stone, Thanos had _three_ of them.

“For everyone’s sake, I hope you’re right, Captain Rogers.” T’Challa’s dark gaze swept around them all; he had always seemed to carry the air of someone who had aged far ahead of his time. “It might be wise for you to snatch a few hours of sleep if you can. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.”

And with that, he beckoned for Shuri and the queen to follow him to another room.

Steve felt a tug on his arm. Natasha—her green eyes troubled under her unfortunately bleached eyebrows—was entreating him to come with her. They exited the double doors leading from the throne room and walked silently through the palace’s halls side by side, their hands just barely brushing. A little shiver collapsed down his spine each time they did. 

He didn’t ask where they were going because she seemed assured enough in her movements. (Where she had gotten the time to canvas the palace’s layout, he didn’t know. She’d arrived roughly at the same time as he did, and _he_ had trouble locating the bathroom chambers in his spacious suite.) They took a left, walked a little while, took a right; eventually, they reached one of the outdoor balconies that punctuated the palace at geometric intervals. Natasha leaned against the intricately carved railing, and he followed her lead.

A pleasant breeze swam through their hair.

The sun was rapidly descending in the orange and gold and pink and shot through with purple sky.

He was suddenly reminded of Sokovia, of the precipice they had stood on there.

Of the dark sky that was deadly but beautiful.

Of the certain death that had faced them then.

Natasha was thoughtful as she looked out at the sunset, at the wide expanse of Wakandan plains stretched out boundlessly before them. All of it was bathed in color, so that every shrub, tree, animal, and building seemed hyperreal, an elaborate trick of the light. She didn’t proffer any particular comment on the view, but he could tell that she appreciated it, was delineating it carefully in that ridiculously precise memory of hers.

Steve resisted the urge to wrap his arms around her and never let her go.

For this moment felt fragile.

Breakable.

(They would never be here like this again.)

“This time feels different, doesn’t it?” Natasha asked, not looking at him. Her slender fingers had a tightened grip on the rail.

So she felt it, too.

Steve clasped his hand over hers in reply.

She didn’t move away.

But she didn’t turn his way either.

“I want to be together on the battlefield tomorrow,” she murmured. “Obviously not attached to the hip, but I want us to fight side by side—like old times.”

“You’ll go low, and I’ll go high?” He tried to smile, but it faltered on his lips.

“Yeah. You can punch Thanos in the face, and I’ll kick him in the balls.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“It’s more than a plan. It’s a promise. We’ll make that bastard wish he’d never came to Earth, never killed Vis—” She stopped mid-word and was silent for a long moment. Her fingers tensed beneath his. “Let’s be together tomorrow, Steve.”

In combat.

In death.

Falling off the precipice with intertwined fingers because they sure as hell weren’t going to survive it unscathed… if at all.

“We’ll be together,” he promised.

He preferred it that way.

The Wakandan night bursted with silver stars as the sun finally fell away from the world, a high crescent moon taking its place.

It was beautiful.

It was temporary.

Natasha leaned against him, and he encircled his free arm around her waist, and they swayed gently under the moonlight.

They were just the same.

They had always been this way.

Beautiful.

Temporary.  



End file.
